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Technical Paper
Prepared by:
Ascom Network Testing
Date:
16 Aug 2010
Document:
46/19817-AOMR 305 001 Rev G
Ascom (2010)
All rights reserved. TEMS is a trademark of Ascom. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.
Contents
Ascom (2010)
Introduction ................................................................ 1
Background ................................................................ 1
2.1
2.2
3.1
3.2
UMTS ........................................................................................... 1
CDMA .......................................................................................... 2
SQI-MOS Output......................................................... 3
4.1
4.2
5.1
6.1
GSM ............................................................................................. 5
References.................................................................. 5
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46/19817-AOMR 305 001 Rev G
Introduction
TEMS products offer the quality measure SQI (Speech Quality Index) for
estimating the downlink speech quality in a GSM, WCDMA, or CDMA
cellular network as perceived by a human listener. SQI has been developed
by Ericsson.1
Computing SQI for GSM and WCDMA requires data collected with Sony
Ericsson phones. SQI for CDMA can be based on data from any CDMA
phone that is connectable in TEMS Investigation.
Background
2.1
2.2
3.1
UMTS
The frame error rate (FER, in GSM) or block error rate (BLER, in
WCDMA), i.e. the percentage of radio frames/blocks that are lost on
their way to the receiving party, usually because of bad radio conditions.
Frame/Block errors also occur in connection with handover, and these
are treated like any other frame/block errors by the SQI-MOS algorithm.
Ascom (2010)
The TEMS business was owned by Ericsson until 2009, when it was acquired by Ascom.
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The bit error rate (BER). This is available in GSM only; no such quantity
is reported by UEs in WCDMA mode.
The speech codec used. The general speech quality level and the
highest attainable quality vary widely between codecs. Moreover, each
speech codec has its own strengths and weaknesses with regard to
input properties and channel conditions. The same basic SQI-MOS
model is used for all supported speech codecs, but the model is tuned
separately for each codec to capture its unique characteristics.
3.2
CDMA
SQI-MOS for CDMA closely resembles WCDMA SQI; compare section 3.1.
Input parameters are:
QCELP13K
EVRC
SMV
Ascom (2010)
In contrast, the old SQI algorithm included a special handover penalty mechanism
lowering the SQI score whenever a handover occurred.
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SQI-MOS Output
The output from the SQI-MOS calculation is a score on the ACR3 MOS
scale which is widely used in listening tests and familiar to cellular
operators. The score is thus a value ranging from 1 to 5.
The SQI-MOS algorithm produces a new quality estimate at intervals of
(CDMA) 24 s
4.1
4.2
The old SQI was expressed in dBQ.4 It should be stressed that SQI-MOS
cannot be derived from these dBQ scores; the two algorithms are distinct
(even if similar in general terms), and no exact mapping exists in this case
either.
ACR stands for Absolute Category Rating: this is the regular MOS test where speech
samples are rated without being compared to a reference.
4
The old SQI is still accessible in TEMS products (TEMS Investigation, TEMS
Presentation), side by side with SQI-MOS.
5
See www.pesq.org.
6
This is completely different from the old SQI algorithm, which was trained using listening
tests alone. At the time that work was done, no objective speech quality measure of the
caliber of PESQ was yet commercially available.
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Both methods try to assess to what degree the distortions in the received
signal will be audible to the human ear; but they do it in completely different
ways.
PESQ scores need to be averaged over a range of speakers in order to
eliminate speaker bias, i.e. variation stemming from the characteristics of
individual speakers. Such averaging is not required in the case of SQIMOS, since the speaker-contingent variation is already built into the model
(it has been trained with a large number of speakers).
5.1
(This subsection is relevant for UMTS only, since CDMA SQI currently does
not extend to wideband.)
The PESQ algorithm for wideband (8 kHz) speech coding as opposed to
that for narrowband (4 kHz) is afflicted with certain recognized
shortcomings. The use of PESQ as a benchmark therefore complicated the
development of SQI-MOS for wideband. Below is a brief discussion of this
topic.
One relevant fact is that, in certain circumstances, wideband PESQ has
been found to produce lower scores than narrowband PESQ, even for
clean speech.7 This difference in output range would not in itself be
problematic if wideband PESQ behaved similarly to narrowband PESQ as a
function of FER/BLER; a mapping could then be applied to align the
wideband scores to narrowband.
Unfortunately, things are not that simple. Wideband PESQ is much more
sensitive to speaker bias than is narrowband PESQ (compare the
introduction of chapter 5): at a fixed FER/BLER, wideband PESQ scores for
different speakers show a spread of more than one point on the MOS
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6.1
GSM
In the past, speech quality in GSM networks was often measured by means
of the RxQual parameter (which is also available in TEMS products). Since
RxQual is merely a mapping of time-averaged bit error rates into a scale
from 0 to 7 (see 3GPP TS 45.008, section 8.2.4), it cannot of course
provide more than a rough indication of speech quality.
References
[1]
[2]
This is explicitly stated in [2]. Further comment on ITU Recommendation P.862.2 and on
the difficulty of applying a uniform speech quality measurement model to both
narrowband and wideband is found in [3].
9
FER = 60% was selected as endpoint. Samples with FER > 60% were excluded from the
SQI-MOS modeling, since PESQ (as is well known) sometimes judges severely
disturbed speech in a misleading manner: certain very bad (almost muted) samples
receive high PESQ scores.
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[3]
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